


Wherever You Are, I'm With You

by naznahl



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Dirty Talk, Dry Humping, Non-Gendered Warrior of Light, Other, Takes Place in Shadowbringers, Unnamed Warrior of Light - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 19:22:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30144381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naznahl/pseuds/naznahl
Summary: Ardbert thinks you're calmer than him, but you never have been calm when it comes to him.
Relationships: Ardbert/Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 30
Collections: Final Fantasy XIV - Ardbert x WoL Recommendations





	Wherever You Are, I'm With You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sugarplumfairy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarplumfairy/gifts).



> Your sad star  
> Was briefly my joy:  
> It sparkled and fell  
> To the earth, a dark stone.
> 
> Your sad soul  
> Did not dare to love a smile,  
> And rushing from me,  
> It put on a black shroud.
> 
> But I joined my fate  
> To yours forever, in one hope:  
> Wherever you are, I am with you,  
> And I love you as before.
> 
> Zinaida Gippius, [Like Before](https://ruverses.com/zinaida-gippius/like-before/)

He’s pacing, and you can hear the heavy clunking of his boots against the wood of your floor. Well, you can’t, really – _obviously_ – but you do still hear it. The sound vibrates in your chest, so it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. You remain calm, because you have to, in the face of his disquiet.

“Tell me,” you say.

“Tell you what?” He doesn’t stop in his ceaseless strides, but swivels his gaze at you before turning on his heel into the next circle. He’s such a kinetic person, you’ve realized. It’s funny sometimes, when he pulls faces at you while you try to listen to someone ask inane questions, or when he pretends to chop off the head of anyone being unbearably annoying.

Other times, it’s like this, all the frustrations and anxieties in a non-body that cannot displace the energy contained within it. All you can see is the blood on his axe in these moments as the metal glints at you. You wonder who it belongs to, if any of it is yours. You wonder what makes you want it to be yours. 

You need the reassurance, perhaps, of knowing that there’s a piece of you that has made it to him in the space he occupies between realities. You can’t touch him, but your blood will always remember that you did once, even if it wasn’t the way you wanted to. At least now, it isn't the way you want to touch him. 

“Tell me what’s wrong. What are you thinking?” You track him with your eyes, the curve of his shoulder and the length between his steps so long. 

He doesn’t stop, but does slow his strides at your words. The turns are slower, at least. More of a pause at the end. 

You stand, stepping into his path, and he startles as if he is going to collide with you. He scowls when he realizes what he’s done, and your grin is right in the path of his teeth as he snaps at you.

“Why are you so calm?” 

“I’m not. I’m not, Ardbert.” You think to reach out in comfort to him and stop short of his glove, your hand hovering over his. You can feel a pulse in the centimeters between your palms. You’re not calm. You’re a rock on which his waves are breaking, but you’re in the same tumultuous waters. 

“It all comes to naught, eventually.” His voice is so quiet in the space between you that you can barely hear him. He’s looking at his feet, where he’s stepped into your boot. He shifts his own away so you're no longer cutting through one another. “All the days I spent fighting, exhausting myself, pushing myself into just one more, just one more day, one more battle. It all came to naught, and it will for you as well.” 

He’s wearing you down, you think. The resolve you have been holding onto is being weathered down by his emotions – your emotions, too, because there’s no world in which your heart wouldn’t break at the sight of him. You can’t help the crack in your voice when you speak. 

“Where does it hurt, Ardbert?” you say, your voice shallow. You’re even quieter than he was. 

“It doesn't hurt,” he insists, “I don’t have anything that would feel the hurt.” 

You sigh and see the disturbance of his hair with your breath. You _do_ see it. 

“Ardbert, stop. Tell me where it hurts.” 

He lifts his face and catches your gaze, and you beg him to keep the sea of his eyes on yours. He sighs, and your hair moves too. It does. 

“My right shoulder,” he says finally. “There’s an old injury there, from when I rammed it into a door too hard. I didn’t have time to put any armor on. We were – ” his voice catches. “Renda got trapped somewhere… the memory has gotten vague but I needed to get her out of a room… a house? No, there were stone walls, so perhaps a fort of some sort. She would wander off on her own a lot, then. We couldn’t find her for so long.” 

He stops because he has to sob, loudly, brokenly. “It hurts.”

It does hurt. You pull him in with your gaze because it’s the best you can do. “Ardbert, will you, perhaps,” – the starts and stops of your words are so ridiculous, in so many ways – “will you sit on the bed with me?” 

You go first, because it’s probably easier, sitting up near the headboard with your legs crossed in front of you. You toss a pillow aside and palm over the space in front of you to smooth down the sheets, inviting him in with a tilt of your head. He looks at you, his broken expression fading to a confusion as he wonders what you’re up to. But at the least he listens to you, his form wavering into deep purple light as he disappears and reappears on the bed, mimicking your cross-legged posture. 

It had been a funny exercise to have him show you what he could phase through and what he couldn’t. Walking through doors and walls was no issue, and he'd often run ahead to survey the dangers ahead of you when he was concerned for your safety. He could also fall through chairs comically onto his tailbone, pretending it stung, rubbing his backside to make you laugh. 

Stairs had been your main point of confusion, wondering how he could follow you to your upstairs inn room when he would simply phase through the steps. He said that he could will his shade into remembering surfaces, but it took less effort to simply disappear and reappear on top of whatever he needed to be on. _The difference between squatting over a chair and actually putting your ass upon the wood,_ he’d said.

You and he consider each other, facing each other on the bed like this, the air too awkward in a way you don’t want it to be. It should be a familiar comfort to be with him. 

“I don’t know if…” you start, “I’ve seen you hold your axe before, but are you able to take off your armor?” You bite your lip, waiting for him to think it over.

“Yes, I can.” The answer is immediate, and you want to stop what you’re doing to ask him when he’s tried before. You want him to make you laugh, telling you about whatever he’d done with his clothes off. It was sure to be a tale, because he’s good at weaving them for you whenever you ask, making up truths where he could not remember them. And you will ask him, you promise yourself, because you have the time with him. He’ll be there for you to ask. He will. 

“You might not have a body, but you have me,” you tell him. “And I’m your friend, so I ask you to trust me.” You start pulling off your own shirt, no care towards his seeing you in the nude. 

He pauses, gaze on your bare chest, the bright blue of his eyes shining so brightly. Slowly, he unbuckles his pauldron, tossing it off into the corner of the room where it disappears in a purple black cloud. His coat and shirt go next into the cloud, and he’s staring at you, wide-eyed like he’s confused he doesn’t have anything else to take off. Your eyes soften as you take in the scars and muscle of his bare torso, the brown landscape of his hair trailing into his pants. Your mouth is drier than you want it to be looking at him, but you forge on. 

“Do as I do,” you say, an odd edge in your voice as you take him in still. You can’t move your gaze from him, but it seems that he can’t either. He nods and waits for you. 

You move your hand to grip your right shoulder and he mirrors you exactly, just a fraction of a second behind. You both start rubbing your shoulders simultaneously, your bodies tilting slightly to the side as you lean into the relieving pressure. 

“Here?” you ask. 

“A little more – here.” He shows you, moving up his body, and you move your hand to mirror his. He groans, his face tightening as your thumb digs into a spot right where your shoulder turns into arm. “There, _please_.” 

The whispered _please_ sends a spark of pleasure through your abdomen and, well, alright. You understand your impulse to care for him a bit more now. It's always been an awkward weight carried between the spaces where your hand and his when he walks next to you, his easy present support as he goes on your journey with you. But right now, his eyes have a drowning weight to them. You won't be able to breathe if you keep looking at him. You look anyway. There's nothing else you would choose to do. 

Like this, your eyes on his and his eyes on your hand as you treat your body like a phantom limb of his, you watch the minute details of his face as his features soften. You imagine his pain as yours and then wish it away under your own hand. It feels good enough on you that you have to open your mouth to sigh.

His lips part too, his eyes falling half-shut to the point he has to lift his chin to keep watching you working at your shoulder. You lean forward slightly as your own chin tilts closer to him. You let out a quiet moan as you work through the tension within your body. 

His eyes snap to meet yours at the sound and it sparks a shock through your body. He lets go of his shoulder and you do the same, although you don’t feel like either of you is loosened up enough yet. 

“My thanks.” 

You smile at him and you do believe one day you'll turn to sand under his gaze. “Where else, friend?” 

“I've asked you to entertain an old shade enough for today, I think,” he says, a self-effacing smile sneaking onto his face. “Thank you, I'm feeling better now.” 

You roll your eyes. You lean closer, close enough that your hand would touch his face if you lifted it up. “Where else?” 

“You don’t have to keep helping me,” he doesn't look at you, as he starts to fade to leave you alone on the bed, it makes your heart ache. You don't want him to, he can't. 

“Don’t, wait please.” Without thinking, you reach out, your hand going through his stomach as you try to catch him. He gasps, not at the contact because there is no contact, but for a reason that neither of you would ever be able to define between the two of you. 

“I want to – where else would you want to touch yourself, if you could?” You grimace immediately, realizing what you've said. You should question what you've said, you should, but you don't know what wherewithal you have left to do so. 

He flusters, his cheeks reddening, though they could just as easily not turn red. They don't have to. You wonder if it's instinctual memory or conscious signaling. What's his non-body telling you that his mouth can't? 

“What are you asking me?” He clears his throat, looking at your hand in your lap instead of your chest or your face, all the places you want for him to be looking. 

Your brows furrow and you wonder why he wants you to say it aloud. Doesn't he feel the current over his skin the way you do? The distance between you is flooding with a stream of desire. He should be feeling it too. He _is_ feeling it too, but just too stubborn to be the first one to say it aloud. 

“I want to do what I can for you. Whatever you want me to,” you say. You lick your lips and he does too, still stuck on mirroring you. “Please understand me. If anyone could, it'd be you.” 

He startles, his eyes everywhere but on you. He bites his lips and so do you. He finally, finally, gathers himself and looks at you. So you look back, tilting your head in a nod to match with his. You come to an understanding with one another, as you knew you would. 

“Lie on your back,” he says, his voice so quiet you wouldn't hear it if you weren't so close to him. 

“With my trousers on?”

“For now.” 

“For now,” you echo, dropping backwards onto the bed. You stare up at the ceiling instead of him. 

Ardbert carefully straddles your waist, to where he would be sitting on your thighs if he had the weight to. You both know he's just phasing through them, but neither of you look. You part your thighs to let him in. 

Your breath is still in the air. His breath doesn't exist, so it's just you alone, but his would have the same stagger within it. You know this to be true, also knowing you'll never be able to be proven wrong. 

“Can you… would you run your fingers over your throat, to feel the front of it?”

Your hands are too cold for how warm the skin of your neck is, but you shiver and continue, curious about his motivations. Your forefinger runs across the ridges of your throat, and you try to count the indents, losing your place every time you peek up at his open face. His hand is on his own throat, and he mouths numbers along with you. 

“Just so… like that.” 

“What am I feeling for?” 

“Nothing.” 

You hum lightly, feeling the fluttering in your own throat. You continue rubbing your fingertips across the soft bone of yourself, continuing a tuneless hum to feel how it vibrates under your own touch. 

“Tell me about who you were, as a child,” you say. 

“Wait I – ” His voice catches in his throat.

“Yes?” 

“I – I wanted you to keep touching yourself.” 

“I can touch myself as you speak, Ardbert.” He nods, blushing again, useless as before. 

“Can you… can you move your hands down to your chest?” You do, slowly, your hands stopping your exploration of your throat to slide down the opposite way, down your neck to separate with one another to run over the slope of your shoulders. You give him a look, bidding him to continue. He rolls his eyes at you. 

“I was wild, more so than I ever had the chance to be as a man. I would spend the day fishing, not come home until my back was cracking from the burns and the bites. I – ” 

Your hands curve back over the tops of your arms to your torso. Your fingers run circles over your chest, and his mouth opens again slightly as he struggles to regain his train of thought. You preen for him, smiling for him and stretching up so he can get a better look. 

“I didn't want for anything in those days. I was happy with just the way the birds knew me enough that they did not sound the alarum when I came to the river. It's all I needed.” 

You hum again, circling your fingers over your areolas until they rest over your nipples. You breathe in wait for him, but he's gone somewhere you can't catch him, listening to a rush of water somewhere else. 

“How?” you ask him. He shivers as he returns to you, staring down at you with his too bright eyes. His mouth opens and there's a rasp in his voice when he speaks.

“With your thumbs, not pinching, just enough they become sensitive.” 

“Which birds?” You hold your nipples between your forefingers and thumbs, not rough with yourself at all, just rubbing until they're raised, as he asked. 

You sigh deeply, your chest rising with a deep breath as a tremor of need starts to wash over you. The wave flows down your stomach to your pelvis, and you tilt up to try and gain friction where there's just his thigh sliding through you. 

“The robins. I just - I want to.” He unbuckles his belt, sliding off not-truly your body to sit on the edge of the bed to yank off his trousers, forgetting his boots until he gets caught in them and throwing them off into his aether cloud with a groan of frustration.

You sit up to watch him idly, carefully pulling off your own leftover clothes to place them next to your head. He places his head in his hands on the edge of the bed, thinking or regretting, one or the other.

Holding out your hand, you pretend the curve of his arm is something you know the scars of. “What's wrong, where are you?” 

“Feeling silly,” he responds, his bangs in his eyes as he turns his head to you. You can't move them away. You blow a puff of air at him and he flinches, running his hand over his face to brush his hair aside. 

“It is silly,” you say, trying to temper your voice with kindness. “There's naught we can do about it. Our woes can only be countered with the weal we give each other, and I am giving all I have to you, Ardbert. Take what you can.” 

He turns fully, throwing an arm over your hip so his body is encasing yours. His face is so close you have to lean back on your elbows to keep from his lips phasing through yours. The air between you is thick with wanting, yours or his or both together. 

“You're a warrior aren't you?” you ask him. “Show me who you are, sweet robin.” You blow another breath of air at him and his lips part to breathe you in. 

“Lie on your stomach for me,” he breathes back into you. 

You keep your eyes on him as long you can as you turn and lie down, cradling your head on your arms. He sighs, and you think you would hear the movement of him as he holds up his body into a position that would be flush to yours, his torso across your back. 

“I suppose one bit of good news is that my arms won't hurt from doing this for a while.” His hands come down next to your head and you stare at the veins in his forearm as he drops down to hover over you. 

He sighs and the sound is so close to your ears that you flinch, your body tensing and relaxing from his proximity to you. 

It's like being underwater, his closeness to you. You can't truly feel him, but there's a heaviness surrounding you to where you feel your movements slowing, your hair floating away from you. His voice sends a wave of pressure over your cheek and your eyes have a hard time staying open. 

“Will you, will you put that pillow under your hips, it’ll aid us in some friction, I believe,” he says. 

“Done that before on your own lonely nights, have you?” You feel so far away, but you listen to him, dragging the errant pillow underneath your naked hips, adjusting it to lie flush against you. For the friction, as he said. 

“I didn't have a figment of my imagination talking me through it, when I did.” Laughing in your ear, he moves his arm a little on the bed and you wonder what he's doing before realizing he's trying to make it so his hips angle above yours to where he would be able to enter you, if he could. 

“You're not a figment, Ardbert. You're real. You were really here, and you really are here now,” you sigh, floating away with your thoughts. “You're heavy, matter of fact.” 

“I'm not that heavy.” 

“You're heavy.” 

“Alright, I'm heavy. Tell me about it.” 

“I can tell you've been in many battles, there's more muscle than softness to you,” you sigh, arching your back to curve against the feeling of your words, “And hair. It scratches a little when your stomach rubs against the back of my hips.” 

You sigh, digging into the corner of the pillow as you rock your hips against the fabric. “Do you feel me too?” 

“I don't, but I can see you. The way you just moved was… a sight. Do that again for me, please.” 

You do, easily enough, squeezing to clench the overstuffed pillow between your thighs, lifting your hips and thrusting down against it. You close your eyes and pretend it's a wholly different feeling, warmth and the uniqueness of pleasure that comes solely from having your skin against the skin of someone you adore. It's enough to make you breathe out in a shaky moan. 

He moans with you, mimicking the sound in your ear, sending a ripple of pleasure down your spine. You feel so sensitive, all your flesh awash with sensitivity, currents of aching thirst between your skin and his not-skin. 

“I liked that sound very much, I think,” he muses. He adjusts himself again on top of you, the muscle of his arm flexing in your vision, absolutely distracting you with the lines of his hair and muscle and scars.

So you do it again, hoping his _like_ of you turns into something a bit more with your movements and your sounds. Your rough thrust turns into rocking, gaining rhythm against the fabric until you have to bite down on the sheets to keep yourself from becoming too loud. 

“Wait, wait, don't do that, I want to hear you.” 

“Where would you want to put your cock in me?” you ask him, nonsensical against the growing heat and wetness within you. 

“If I had one, you mean,” he laughs. 

“It's there. Want me to describe it for you?” 

“Absolutely not,” he says. He sighs so close to your ear that your hair stands on end. “With you like this? Between your legs, I think, or anywhere. Wherever you'd let me.” 

“In my mouth,” you declare, your voice loud in the empty room. “So you can watch me take you all the way down, no matter how big the cock you try to give me.” 

He laughs, a little ragged, the sound so close his chest vibrates across your back. Every sound of him pierces through you, but you're pressing back as much as you can with no relief. You want to see what he looks like, when he's breathing like this for you, how flushed and shaky he must appear. 

“I can't do this,” you say, “I want to see you too. Can you lie under me?” 

“I'm, I'm afraid the illusion will shatter if you see me. I am, after all, translucent.” 

You turn your head and rise up, forcing him to pull back. You level your face with him, staring into his cold-blue aether eyes. “I don't want an illusion, I want you.” 

“You're… a rather formidable warrior yourself,” he gulps and you watch the swallow run down his throat, tracing the bump of it until it disappears into nothing. He nods, and you have a small awkward dance with him as you avoid phasing through one another to reposition yourselves. 

Beyond any of your accomplishments as a warrior, you should be lauded for this idea of yours alone. You've done the most inspired thing in your life, deciding to have him between your thighs like this. He's lying flat under you as you sit up on his hips, the poor pillow still clenched between your legs as a stand-in for him. You stare down at the expanse of his body, the flushing redness in his torso existing for no reason other than to make your mouth water at the imagined heat. How could you not have your heart beat faster, loud and strong enough that it could be the sound of both of yours together? 

“Gods, you really do have the most splendid nipples,” you tell him and he huffs out a laugh in mock offense, covering them up with his hands. 

“No, don't do that, don't, Ardbert, I want to see.” You smile at him affectionately, and he smiles back, the moment of tenderness stretching between the two of you long enough that your heart starts to slow into a steady, calm flowing rhythm. He's not half as translucent as he thinks he is, you decide. 

“You're beautiful,” one of you says. It doesn't matter who. Your eyes are focused completely upon each other's. 

“I think I'm a bit in love with you,” the other responds. 

“I suppose we’re paragons of bad decisions.” 

You both continue smiling as your heart breaks, his hands hovering up your thighs to rest near your hips. You lie your hands on top of where he would be gripping you for leverage as you start to rock your pelvis against the pillow again. 

Both of your lips parting, his brows furrowing, your eyes half-shutting, you breathe together with your movements. You sigh, a shiver of a moan in your throat and he does too, the sound of him making the heat spread through your stomach and chest. 

“Talk me through this,” you ask him. You're trying so hard to keep your eyes open, watching his face crumple with the echoed emotions of your own. 

“I would be – I am inside you right now, trying to keep this pace of yours while finding an angle to make you be the one to ruin it. Your fucking and you. I want to see them fall apart.” His chin tilts up as he stares from under his thick eyelashes, grinning crookedly at you. 

“You want to ruin me? Really?” You breathe heavily, quickening the snap of your hips. He laughs, but it's so stilted with his desire, it's distracting, so distracting. 

“I want to see what you look like when you're not so in control.” You laugh now too, curling down your body into his as the heat in your body spikes up into your throat, your moan tight and as staggered as his voice is. 

“Your thighs too,” he continues. “I want to lick my explorations all over your body, but especially your thighs. They make my mouth water spread out like this over me, and I want my teeth in them.” You sob, feeling the parched stretch in you grow painful. Your hips become erratic, the thrust of them growing longer as you will the feeling deeper, higher inside your body. 

“I feel like I'm starving for you, I could swallow the sounds of you right out of your mouth.” He lifts up slightly to meet where you're bending down to reach him, your faces so close he blurs in your vision. “You're so perfect, you are, your whole body was meant to be mine so much that the worlds conspired against it in fear of what we could do together.” 

You breathe a moan onto him and he tilts his open mouth closer so the sound blows through him. “I adore the very air of you, you know. No one could make these sounds like you, no one else could sound so godsdamn vulgar just from fucking a pillow.” 

You're trying to say his name but he has all your air, he's holding all of you within his spectral body and you can't fault him for it because it's just what you wanted from him. You can't breathe at all, just buck your hips thoughtlessly at the feeling of him under you. 

“Do you want to come for me? You sound like you're close, darling. You sound like it. You can, for both of us.” You sob, shaking your head because you want him to keep talking, and he understands you, he does because he keeps going for you. “I'd be coming now too, you know, hot inside you, wet inside you, keeping my hips and your hips moving just to hear the sound of our bodies together while we came. Go on, I want you to feel it.” 

Your orgasm is a river cutting through you, your body tensing with the current of it as it flows over you. You almost say his name, almost, but it turns into a strangled groan stuck inside your mouth as your mind goes blank. 

You collapse on top of him, not caring anymore that you've gone through his body to lie on top of the bed. At least the sound of his breathing is the closest it can possibly be. You close your eyes, your body languid as you lazily rub your hips against the pillow, chasing after whatever leftover spark you can get from it. 

“Hello,” he says, his voice sending a shiver through the bones of your ear. You inhale deeply, smelling something unknown in the air. It must be his scent, you decide. It's so present and real, it has to be. 

“You’re the only thing that doesn’t feel like a dream here. Nothing in this world feels real but you.” You sigh into your arms, closing your eyes. You feel so heavy, as if he's lying on top of you again. 

“You’re the one one dreaming,” he laughs but his voice sounds like he’s underwater. He's disappearing, leaving you to lie in your bed alone. You don't have it in you to ask him to stay anymore. “You’re the one seeing visions of long dead shades.” 

“You’re right. I’m the dreamer,” you say to no one. 


End file.
